Strong take on 'Recount' drama

GOP heavyweight James Baker III and Democratic strategist Ron Klain couldn’t have been more at odds than they were during the disputed Bush v. Gore 2000 election battle in Florida. So it’s no small irony that as HBO’s telefilm “Recount” was being readied, the two men both signed off on a completely fictional scene in which their characters meet briefly on an airport tarmac.

And that was after Baker — the former secretary of state and George W. Bush’s attorney during the 2000 election — corrected a few misspelled words in the script by Danny Strong.

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Recently, as Strong was preparing for the movie’s May 25 debut on the pay cable channel, he talked with Hollywood Politico about his work. Starring Kevin Spacey as Klain and Tom Wilkinson as Baker, the film highlights political pros from Warren Christopher (John Hurt) and Michael Whouley (Denis Leary) on the Dem side to GOP stalwarts Ben Ginsberg (Bob Balaban) and Joe Allbaugh (Stefen Laurantz). Stealing the show — if not the election — is Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, portrayed in all her Cruella De Vil glory by Laura Dern.

As for Strong, the 33-year-old performer is a familiar face to any fan of “Gilmore Girls” or “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Deciding to move from acting to screenwriting several years ago, he pitched the “Recount” idea to HBO, then delivered his clever yet carefully constructed script after months of intense research.

We caught up with him last weekend in Beverly Hills as he took a short break from researching his next project, a script for Universal about the landmark Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education.

Not only is Strong intimately familiar with the colorful participants and timeline of the 2000 recount, but he also dazzled us with his memory of vote counts in each of the individual counties, the subsequent media consortium investigation and the impact of Ralph Nader, as well as other tallies tied to the event.

Q: You spoke to Baker, Klain, Ginsberg and several others before writing “Recount.” What was the rest of your research process like?

A: In my initial round of interviews, which took about three weeks, I talked to 30 people all over the country and then spoke to around 10 to 15 after that. I had to hunt everyone down, just cold-calling people, driving up to Palm Beach County in a rental car and saying, ‘Can I interview you at 4 tomorrow, because that’s all the time I have?’ But Katherine Harris stopped returning my calls when it was time to set an appointment. Theresa LaPore, the same. Joe Allbaugh just said no, and David Leahy, the supervisor of Miami-Dade, didn’t want to be interviewed. Michael Whouley wouldn’t return my calls, and I followed up five times — but as soon as Denis Leary got cast as him, he agreed to meet with Denis.

Q: What was your time like in Washington?

A: I stayed there for a week in a hotel that HBO put me up at by the Capitol. I had a few interviews set up already with Ben Ginsberg and Ron Klain and Jack Young. But I figured, I was in town, so I started cold-calling, going online and hunting people down. Ginsberg was great — he gave me five hours.